What PvP Rules Cost a Farming Route
Forever's PvP ruleset gives low-level characters no protection, and that turns a gathering circuit into shared ground. This is the money side of it: repairs, lost travel, nodes handed to somebody else, and what a layer change actually buys you when the route is being sat on.
No protection for low-level characters
Blizzard has confirmed that the PvP ruleset carries no special protection for low-level characters: a character flagged in a contested zone can be attacked by the opposite faction whatever the level difference. That is a rules decision rather than a tuning value, so it does not vary by zone, by hour, or by how long the realm has been up. For a gatherer it means the circuit you drew on a map is also a circuit somebody else can sit on, and nothing in the system will step in on your behalf.
The practical shape of the cost is interruption rather than defeat. A gathering route assumes you arrive at a node, spend the cast and move on; an opposite-faction player who is faster than you deletes the second half of that sentence and leaves the travel in place. The money in that is plain arithmetic, because the trip was paid for in minutes and the bags came home lighter. Anyone working through the plan for making gold from 1 to 60 is budgeting hours against a target, and this is the ruleset that moves the hours.
It is also a choice made once. The ruleset belongs to the realm rather than to the character, so a farmer who dislikes being interrupted cannot opt out later without starting again somewhere else. That is worth weighing before the world opens rather than after, because the same route pays differently depending on which realm it is walked on.
What one death takes out of the bags
A death on a farming route sends 3 separate bills. The first is repair, since armour loses durability and the gear that was good enough for mobs is the gear paid for at a vendor afterwards; the durability bill after dying is the line most route plans forget to subtract. The second is the corpse run, which is pure travel with no gathering in it. The third appears only if you take the shortcut, because the spirit healer's resurrection charge arrives with a penalty on top of the coin.
The bill nobody writes down is the node. Gathering spawns are shared, so a farmer who spends several minutes dead and several more walking back is handing the respawn to whoever is still standing. On a busy route that is often the largest item in the account, larger than repairs, because it compounds: every interruption pushes the circuit further out of step with its own timers. What a full death costs is therefore route-dependent rather than a fixed figure.
This is where a second player changes the arithmetic. Farming in a group splits the yield, but it also removes the scenario where one attacker holds an entire circuit on their own, and on contested ground that trade is often worth making. Our reading: solo work pays better per node and worse per hour on a PvP realm, and the gap widens the longer the realm has been settled.
Layers are an exit, not a fix
Layering is the exit everyone reaches for. The world runs as copies, and a character who changes layer arrives in the same zone without the player who was standing over the corpse. That is why how layering moves a farmer belongs in any discussion of camping at all: it is the one mechanic that ends a standoff without winning a fight. It is not a button advertised for the purpose, and it depends on being able to join somebody who is already on another copy.
The exit still costs something. A layer change does not restore durability, does not refund the corpse run, and drops you into a copy of the zone where the nodes may already have been worked by somebody else. In the good case it converts an open-ended camp into a fixed, countable loss. In the bad case it trades a known attacker for an unknown route. Treat it as damage control rather than as a farming technique in its own right.
We are also not describing a guarantee. Layer behaviour on a test client is not a promise about live realms, and how freely characters move between copies is exactly the sort of thing that gets tuned once a realm fills up. Plan the circuit as though the exit might not be available on the evening you need it.
What we cannot put a number on
There are figures we do not have and will not invent. We cannot tell you how often a given route is interrupted, what a repair bill comes to after an evening of it, or what share of a circuit's yield goes to other players rather than to ordinary competition for nodes. All of that depends on realm population, faction balance and the hour you play, and none of it is settled before the world opens on 4 November.
What can be reasoned about is structure. Gold priced without a Token comes entirely from players, so anything that takes hours away from gatherers takes supply out of the listings, and a PvP realm takes more of them than a PvE one. Whether that surfaces as dearer materials or simply as fewer farmers on the contested routes is open. We will revise this once there are routes being walked rather than described.
Questions
Does the PvP ruleset make farming unprofitable?
No, it makes it less predictable. The yield per node is the same on either ruleset; what changes is how many of the planned minutes are spent gathering rather than travelling, waiting or repairing. A route that works on a quiet evening can be unworkable on a busy one, and that variance is the real cost rather than any single loss.
Can a low-level character be attacked by a much higher one?
Yes. Blizzard confirmed that the PvP ruleset includes no protection based on level difference, so a flagged character in a contested zone is a target for the opposite faction regardless of the gap. It is a deliberate rules decision, not something that varies by zone or gets adjusted as the realm ages.
Does changing layer help when you are being camped?
It can end the standoff, because the other player does not travel with you to another copy of the zone. It does not refund anything you already paid: the repair bill, the corpse run and the missed respawns stay where they are, and the new copy may have been picked clean by somebody else. It is an exit, not a remedy.
What does a death on a farming route actually cost?
Repair on damaged armour, the travel time of a corpse run, and whatever the route loses while you are away from it. The last one is usually the biggest and the hardest to see, since the spawns you were cycling continue without you. We publish no gold-per-hour numbers for it, because the answer depends on the realm, the zone and the hour.
Sources
- Blizzard's official announcements and patch notes, where ruleset decisions are stated rather than inferred — World of Warcraft news.
- Community reports from the test client, useful for behaviour but not a promise about live realms — Blizzard WoW forums.